Chapter 180: Drawer

Placing the glass shards on the ground, I covertly watched Zhang Jiaqi's expression. When I said the word "corpse," her pupils involuntarily contracted.

"I find you really weird. You claim to be a paranormal Streamer, but you never interact with your audience. Yet you pay close attention to every other detail with a terrifying sharpness. Don't tell me you picked that up working at the crematorium." Zhang Jiaqi stared at me wide-eyed, as if trying to see right through me.

"You actually hit the nail on the head. Burning a corpse is no easier than dissecting one. It's a real test of hand-eye coordination and temperature control." I brushed her off casually, mentally running through every scene I had witnessed.

'There is definitely something wrong with this Zhang Jiaqi, but she is the first living person I've encountered in this school. If I want to learn more, I can only start with her.' Silently plotting how to complete the commission from the Underworld, I couldn't shake the feeling that this live stream was far too peaceful. Murderous intent lay hidden in the shadows; this had to be the calm before the storm. 'Before the real danger arrives, I absolutely must gather more clues and uncover the truth.'

Zhang Jiaqi and I headed toward another Laboratory Building. As we passed the collapsed tunnel entrance, I casually asked, "I heard from your upperclassmen that your school still has several underground tunnels. I don't know if it's true."

"It's true. They run under most of the medical school, though some students don't know about them," Zhang Jiaqi replied offhandedly. "But you'd better not get too close to those passages. They've been in disrepair for years, and they were used exclusively to transport corpses."

"Transport corpses?"

"The school usually didn't want students to know about the corpses they bought from the outside. They were all brought in through the underground passages, processed directly into specimens down there, and finally stored in the underground corpse vault for students to use in anatomy classes."

"Oh, good to know."

Zhang Jiaqi led me to a building a short distance away. By now, not a single sliver of light remained across the entire campus. It felt as if we had stepped into a dead zone, completely isolated from the city outside.

"The building we were just in displayed the gross anatomy teachers, which are complete human specimens mainly used for dissection by us human anatomy majors. This building, however, is the regional anatomy specimen room. It's full of various organs and things like that. I suggest you try dry-heaving for a bit to empty your stomach before we go in." Zhang Jiaqi looked at me provocatively. "Isolated organs are far more jarring than the gross anatomy teachers."

"Don't worry about me. Let's just go in." A person's psychological endurance continuously improves with experience and exposure. After surviving that live stream at the Henshan Psychiatric Hospital, I had developed a strong immunity to gore.

"Don't speak too soon." Zhang Jiaqi led me around the main entrance, skillfully navigating to the west side of the building, where a stack of stone bricks had already been laid out. "The second-floor window isn't locked. We climb up from here and step on the AC compressor to get inside."

She gave me a demonstration first, easily climbing up to the second floor. "Come on up."

I set the Black Leather Suitcase aside and climbed up to the second floor holding only my phone. Zhang Jiaqi was standing by the window, her expression growing increasingly strange. "Welcome to the world of specimens."

She shone her phone's light, and the array of jars on the shelves made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Submerged in these arm-tall jars were various human organs and infant corpses.

They were neatly arranged, lined up row after row.

Unlike the pure gore of the Henshan Psychiatric Hospital, this fear and discomfort stemmed from the environment itself.

As we walked between the two rows of shelves, a bubble or two occasionally rose in the jars. I had never observed corpses in such meticulous detail before.

They were too exquisite, exquisite to the point of terror.

Their thin eyelids covered their eyes like cling wrap. They didn't seem truly dead; it felt as though they might suddenly open their tightly shut eyes at any moment.

"Scared?" Zhang Jiaqi held up her phone, the light dancing across the jars.

"A little," I admitted honestly. These specimens soaked in formalin seemed to exist in a space between life and death. They weren't living people, nor were they ghosts; their time had frozen at the exact moment they became specimens.

"I thought you would keep stubbornly insisting you weren't scared. Five years ago, Teacher Liu used to teach in this building. Her office was right upstairs." Zhang Jiaqi opened the door and walked out with her phone in hand. Her nerves were absurdly thick; she wasn't the least bit afraid of whatever danger might lurk in the hall.

"Is the entire building filled with specimens like these?" I followed close behind, keeping a constant eye on our surroundings.

"Most of it, aside from the underground corpse vault." Zhang Jiaqi didn't look back. She was walking faster and faster, as if rushing against the clock.

Following Zhang Jiaqi up to the third floor, I noticed the doors to several classrooms along the way were left ajar, none of them locked.

I pushed one of the doors open a crack and peeked inside. It was pitch-black. I could just make out a few motionless figures standing silently in the dark. I didn't know if they were mannequins or something else entirely.

Zhang Jiaqi was walking far too quickly. Not having the time to investigate every classroom, I had to jog to keep up so I wouldn't lose her.

"Hey, why are you in such a hurry?" I asked, only voicing the question when Zhang Jiaqi slowed down at the stairwell corner.

"Don't you think this place is terrifying? The pitch-black corridors, the old floors... It'd be one thing if the classrooms on both sides were locked, but the doors are all open. If there's something horrifying hiding inside, and it suddenly reaches out a hand as you walk past..."

"Stop." I cut Zhang Jiaqi off. "Where exactly is your Teacher Liu's office?"

"We're almost there." Zhang Jiaqi shrugged, her gaze skipping over my shoulder to look at the classrooms lining the corridor. "It's on the fourth floor."

She turned and jogged upstairs. I followed closely behind, occasionally glancing back over my own shoulder.

'What was Zhang Jiaqi looking at with that final glance?'

I distinctly felt that she had experienced a rare surge of fear in that split second; otherwise, she wouldn't have made such a deliberately unnatural gesture as shrugging.

Arriving at the fourth floor, Zhang Jiaqi used my phone to illuminate the doorplate on the wall. "Anatomy and Biopharmaceuticals Office."

"This is it." The office door was also unlocked. Zhang Jiaqi entered first, waving for me to hurry inside.

"Biopharmaceuticals? That and human anatomy should be two entirely unrelated fields." I glanced at the doorknob. There wasn't a speck of dust on it; it had clearly been opened recently.

"Hurry up and come in!" Zhang Jiaqi pulled me into the room. She cast a stealthy glance toward the end of the pitch-black corridor outside before gently closing the door. I noticed her action—the door wasn't completely shut; it was left open a sliver.

Once inside, Zhang Jiaqi visibly relaxed. She began flipping through various documents in the room, returning everything perfectly to its original place after reading, as if terrified of being discovered.

'Leaving the door unlocked, returning items to their exact places... what exactly is going through this woman's head? Is she really here to look for her teacher?' I swept my gaze across the surroundings and started walking around the room.

The office was roughly thirty square meters, spacious enough for four or five people to work together. In reality, however, there were only two desks. The rest of the space was occupied by bookcases storing files and precious specimens.

"Reconstruction of Human Functions? Cranial Nerve Stimulation Resuscitation Experiment?" Dust-covered files lined the bookshelves. The titles were tongue-twisters, and I couldn't understand a single thing about their contents.

"Remember, whatever you pick up, make sure to put it back exactly where you found it," Zhang Jiaqi instructed me before going right back to her own search.

I placed the file back into the bookcase. Rather than trying to comprehend these obscure experiment reports, I preferred looking for more direct and obvious clues.

Closing the cabinet door, I walked over to the desk. The keys to the drawer were still resting in the lock.

'This keyring has two small keys and three large ones. The small ones are for the drawer, but what are the large ones for?' I opened the drawer, quietly slipped the keys into my pocket, and felt around inside.

"What is this?"

Two small bags of long-spoiled nuts were scattered inside the drawer. Beside the nuts was a small bottle of pills.

"Nivolumab?"

Just as I was frowning at the bottle full of English letters, Zhang Jiaqi walked over. "Nivolumab. It's a drug used to treat advanced-stage lung cancer. But this medicine shouldn't be used carelessly; the side effects are severe. If someone who doesn't have cancer takes it casually, it will destroy their immune system, attack normal cells, and cause them to mutate into cancer."